Collection Report - September 29, 2013

Sunday, September 29. 1:40PM, right at very weak low tide. 60 degrees. Bright, bright sun. Cool seabreeze coming in. Low energy week, unchanged largely since last week.

The foreshore still awash with jumbled and poorly sorted cobbles, pebbles, and wrack. On this early fall day the backshore still looked an awful lot like summer!

A truly beautiful day to have a beach all to myself.

Things I noticed this week: The slope down to the waterline felt longer, more gradual, more consistent & noticeable. There were fewer flat berms and falloffs. There was little sorting or piling of new cusps & mounds. And little new wrack come in. But at very back of last high-tide line (20-30 feet up from what had been the end of the live-algae zone), I found an area of smushed & sand-tossed loose wrack. Lots of vinyl & plastic churned up through this loose wrack.

It's rare at Curtis Cove to see that kind of mixing. Usually the vinyl sits on top, but this stuff got churned into the back of the foreshore, yet not dragged away. As though a couple last high waves made an energetic slush, that then quickly died back away.

So what did I find?

528 pcs of nonrope debris

528 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 0
• Fishing misc.: 481 (456 vinyl lobster trap coating bits, 9 trap parts, 2 bumpers, big ball of fishing line, 13 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 11 (bottom of drink bottle, 4 bottlecap o-rings, 5 cup scraps, container)
• Food-related glass/metal: 1 (tiny aluminum can scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 9 ("silk" flower, 6 cable ties, o-ring, anchor)
• Scrap plastics: 25 (4 > 1" , 21 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 1 (sea glass)

Another zero-rope week! That's become a very good indicator of a very low-energy week at the cove. As is the return of large masses of lobster trap vinyl:

Beyond the vinyl, I did find one other interesting thing:

This bleached, faded, & abraded cup surely has a tale to tell. Who lost it? Where? When? Why? How? So many questions -- all of them essential if we're ever going to reclaim clean oceans & give our descendants reason not to despise us. Yet none of them answerable.

The tides go on.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 9848
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1862
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 6123